Exodus?

I’ve always thought when facebook and twitter got mainstream the kids would leave for somewhere ‘cooler’… as happened to MySpace.

Now Miley Cyrus (1.1 million followers) has [reportedly] bailed on twitter… too trivial, too intrusive, too demanding, too ADHD-inspiring would be my guess. Watch her rap yourself, and observe her own entertaining ‘explanation’…

Twitter followers are not friends. For many, facebook ‘friends’ are often not friends either. Insincerity abounds. (Just like the ‘real’ world?) In my view there’s a lot of the commercial equivalent of ‘cupboard love’ happening on the internet, you know: “Follow me and I’ll follow you”, or “I’ll follow you to see if I can copy you/sell you something/clip the ticket” etc.

Is the end nigh? Not for social networking. That, like the poor, will always be with us, but this ‘instant micro-blogging’ stuff, surely we’ll start seeing a law of diminishing returns? The democratization of ‘news’ and ‘opinion’ in many cases leads to the lowest common denominator and a terrible loss of ‘value’ in exchange for the time-and-attention (today’s currency) we expend.

Like any movement or market, a tiny minority have real influence … the rest, the crowd is just a mob of ‘followers’ — some with quite unrealistic fantasies about how meaningful, influential, inspirational their efforts are. (Mea culpa, btw. I’m no-one special. But we are each, by definition, the centre of the universe.) Self-expression is a wonderful thing but don’t confuse it with influence.

Last line from Miley’s rap:

I might have some withdrawals, I was a little obsessed, but I’m peacin’ out and I’m leaving with this… ha! Goodbye.

It had 1.8 million views when I first saw it. Update: A day later 2.9 M and 38,000 comments on that youtube listing with a burgeoning catalogue of ‘video responses’. What a load on google’s servers! (HOW do they pay for this bandwidth?)

Wow, it reinforces my wonder at the ‘power of celebrity’ as discussed re Stephen Fry.

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I’m all for leveraging off other people’s research and involvement (did someone say ‘obsession’?) on a topic which also interests me. Everyone is a librarian of what they’re focussed on and we can learn so much from each other. The ‘global’ aspect of the web is a wonderful revolution. Nothing short of it.

Like many, I guess, I’m a fairly heavy consumer of what I think of as ‘content aggregators’ — media/politics sites like Huffington Post, news sites like NY Times, Guardian, BBC, WashPo or various tech sites and tech-focussed blogs like Daring Fireball or Roughly Drafted Magazine or FSJ, PropertyTalk, and various other discussion forums …

… they can be sort of the online equivalent of the social time at a club — a concentration of ‘talking shop’, chit-chat and gossip, jokes and interesting tidbits, even sometimes quite heated exchanges of opinion. All good, as Donna Richardson says.

It’s a big step from visiting a site to the always-on, always-connected, ‘What are you doing now?’,’Getting on a bus, what about you?’, ‘Ironing my shirt’, ’Waiting for a lift’ stuff. [Gawd, I watch my daughter and her SMS text-life: “sup wif u?” (2,000 a month seems light to her!)]

I’m not anti-Twitter, really, but I DO have a reaction to the hype generated around it.

Especially when the hype is used to sell people on a new wave of ‘internet marketing’ snake oil … pitched by the usual suspects with thin track records gushing about how easy it is to ‘replace your income’ (i.e get rich) through inadequately-disclosed affiliate schemes for flying circuses.

I suggest the instant micro-blogging mania will turn out to be a fad … leaving flotsam and jetsam bobbing around in the interwebs for some time … just as Perry so eloquently suggests…

Does that mean I agree with Alvin Toffler’s vision of extreme individualism, with each of us reclining in our own cocoon, ‘connected’ to our own ‘channel’ of entertainment 24/7, headphone and personal display glasses welded to our bodies?
Well, not really. Not that extreme. (But count the white earbuds you see next time you’re out in public.)

Re Twitter, to quote Miley Cyrus on why she’s outta there:

The reasons are simple, I started tweetin’ bout pimples
I stopped living for moments and started living for people.
Yeah you write what you’re doing but who really cares
if I’m playing with Noah or just doin’ my hair?

Quite right, Miley. Who cares? Not me.

It’s the triviality, the sheer banality of many (most?) such micro interactions/content that risks wearing out Twitter’s welcome, as this talented, sensible young woman has worked out.

These are my opinions, as always. I could be wrong, of course. (It’s been known to happen.)

—On Facebook

But Facebook is a different thing. As I mentioned above, Facebook has become mainstream … it has settled into a groove for all ages…. from the ‘Look at me, I have 2000 friends’ peeing competition to a fairly customised-customisable connecting internet thingy which I happily use with my [real] friends and family to a varying extent. (Yet, there’s always been tension about the privacy aspects of Facebook . That hasn’t gone away. Let’s discuss that another time.)

Whether Facebook retains the crown or not (Google is going hard after it, and others are looking for integration with their own sites to prise eyeballs away from Zuckerberg) remains to be seen. Monetizing the business (as opposed to the founder/shareholders selling slices) is the challenge, it seems to me. But I don’t know much about that.

Apropos, I heard on the BBC this morning the Auschwitz Holocaust Museum has just opened a Facebook page … setting out in part to be a discussion forum, according to the AP article in the NZ Herald …

The page aims to be a forum for discussion, reflection and learning about the Nazi death camp…

Cool. But they’re going to strictly CENSOR SOME CONTENT…

So far, the site has seen no postings by Holocaust deniers, Sawicki said. If they do show up, they will be removed quickly, he said, adding that engaging such people in dialogue is “a waste of time.”

Fair enough, that’s their call. There’s some stuff they don’t want talked about on their forum. But then, they’re NOT promoting themselves as ‘free and independent’.

Miley would be crazy NOT to reactivate her Twitter account when she next has something to publicise — given the worldwide attention her ‘I deleted my twitter’ statement has received, her re-joining it would be headline news. That would be no surprise (according to some reports, it’s what her Dad is ‘pressuring’ her to do).

The point is, the ‘new’ Miley Cyrus tweets if/when they appear are unlikely, surely, to contain the “got a pimple/doing my hair/playin’ with Noah” trivia. In other words, her use of the medium will have matured. (Or she may get a ghost writer/PR person to do them — just as celebrities have ‘stylists’.)

Of course (and I mean this) I could have completely the wrong end of the stick in my forecasts of Twitter’s ‘inevitable’ decline from its peak of popularity.
It too may become mainstream. There’s a good chance of that, I concede.

Like Facebook’s pre-eminence before Twitter came along a ‘de-perched’ it (like my new word?) among cool, hip things, (just as Facebook de-throned MySpace) Twitter may consolidate to become a near-essential part of many people’s daily communication with others. Facebook is weaving and bobbing, trying to become more Twitter-like, I hear.

It seems to me people like you use the ‘connectedness’ of tweets as a sort of email list or RSS list on steroids — getting updates on information you care about quickly from a wide variety of sources. From ‘new post on my blog/podcast episode on iTunes’ to ‘software update available now’ to ‘new listing: 3 br house in your target area’, to ‘prices slashed at Magnum Mac’ … if the information is OF INTEREST, that channel will only get stronger.

In that respect, in some ways the Tweet ‘medium’ resembles SMS text message updates like those I get from my garage telling me my car is due for a service or a WOF. It used to be they came as a letter, then a postcard in the mail. Now even the Companies Office prefers to send Annual Return reminders by email or SMS.

How long before they ask for my Twitter account?

As I said, Terry, in my view the triviality of a lot of communication undermines it, but your own example, and your point

I agree that it is being used by tonnes of snake oil salesman but then again what other medium out there is not?

echoes an earlier discussion we had about wet-behind-the-ears internet marketing ‘gurus’ re-peddling old direct mail marketing strategies used to sell get-rich-quick snake oil for decades.

The USE doesn’t make the medium ‘bad’. Not at all. The medium doesn’t matter: snake oil is snake oil.